


Her Golden Boy

by aphreal



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 03:37:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphreal/pseuds/aphreal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes giving up a child to a better life is the only love a mother can show. </p><p>Glimpses of Anders's mother throughout the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Golden Boy

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by a beautiful piece of art by tumblr user foxghost, which can be found here: http://foxghost.tumblr.com/post/56162145620/20-chantry-sun-for-dragon-age-reverse-big
> 
> Fox was kind enough to give me permission to post this, even though I wasn't one of the assigned authors for this art piece.

She smiles as she sews, drawing the needle through the soft fabric, silky embroidery thread pulling after it. The materials are a luxury, nicer than anything she has for herself, but the exorbitant cost was worth it. This is for her son, her darling little boy. It has to be special. 

Night after night, she works by candle light – the tallow another luxury devoted to her labor of love – awake long after her husband and son are asleep, staying up to stitch a Chantry sunburst onto what will become a pillow. She can think of nothing more fitting for her son, her little golden boy. Even on the days when he tests her patience, his presence in her life is the Maker’s greatest gift, and with his golden hair and ready laugh, he lights up their home as surely as the sun. She can scarcely remember what her life was like before the Maker finally blessed her with this child, but she knows it was hollow and empty in comparison to what she has now. 

She thanks the Maker and his Bride every day for the miracle of her son; she can’t imagine ever going back to a life without this joy. 

 

When she sees the barn on fire, her heart nearly stops. He was playing out there this morning, looking to see if the barn cat has had her newest litter of kittens yet. 

Before she realizes it, she’s running towards the barn, pulse racing faster than her feet. He isn’t in the small crowd gathering around the burning building, and she begins calling his name. When her increasingly frantic screams draw no answer, her husband and one of the neighbors have to restrain her from rushing into the blaze in search of him. She struggles against their grip. Don’t they understand that her child is in danger? Don’t they care? A third set of hands grasps on to her, finally overpowering her panic-fueled strength. 

A large support beam snaps with an echoing crack, and she collapses along with the roof. All of the strength leaves her body, and she crumples to the ground, keening with sobs as she watches her hopes burn. She stays there, unable to stand, watching helplessly as the barn is reduced to embers. The taste of ashes fills her mouth, and all of the color has been leached out of the world. Nothing matters. 

Hands are shaking her shoulders, and someone is trying to speak to her. She ignores them. What could be important enough to interrupt her grief? It takes many repetitions for the words to resolve into meaning: they’ve found him. 

He wasn’t in the barn. He fled to hide when the fire started, huddling up terrified beneath a clump of bushes on the neighboring farm, and he’s only just been found. She can’t believe it at first, is afraid to let herself hope. Then she sees him, alive and whole and unharmed. His eyes are reddened, and there are tear tracks on his face, pale lines streaking through the soot, dust, and dirt. 

The relief is almost as much of a shock as the grief it replaces, and she can’t find the strength to stand. She opens her arms wide, and her son collapses into her embrace. Gathering him against her, she draws him down to her lap. Fresh tears make their way down her cheeks as she cries in gratitude for this unexpected and miraculous deliverance. His body shakes against her as he succumbs to another bout of crying. She rocks him gently and murmurs reassurances into his hair, her voice hoarse from prolonged sobbing. Gradually, they both calm. 

At twelve, he’s really too big for carrying, but she refuses to let him go even for a moment. Awkwardly, she struggles to her feet. Cradling his lanky form as if he were still the little boy who fell asleep in her lap, she carries him back in to the house. 

It’s only later, after he’s been cleaned up and cried himself to sleep with the embroidered pillow clutched tightly to his chest, that it occurs to her to wonder how the fire started in the first place. 

 

When her husband insists they have to send for the Templars, she reluctantly agrees. The house will feel empty and cold without her bright, golden boy, but she loves him too much to keep him here for her own selfish reasons. She couldn’t live with herself if she put him in danger because her heart breaks at the thought of giving him up. 

What if the next time he sets a fire, he isn’t so fortunate? The sudden blaze in the barn terrified him, and it may have been only luck that he fled to safety. Blind panic could have left him trapped in the inferno, and it still might in the future. She’ll never forget the black pit that opened inside of her when she thought he had died in that barn, and she often wakes in the night shaking with the knowledge that there’s nothing she can do to stop it from truly happening. 

What if a demon comes for him in the Fade? As a boy, he had terrible nightmares, and she remembers many nights spent holding his little trembling form, reassuring him that he was safe, calming him enough that he could fall back asleep. She feels utterly helpless, unable to protect him now that the monsters in his dreams will be real. 

What if the villagers find out what he’s done, declare him an apostate, and come for him? Fear is a powerful thing, and she’s heard of what it can lead to. Not here, but there are stories of similar incidents in similar small communities. She’s only one woman, and it makes her sick to admit she couldn’t save her child if the neighbors came to lynch him. 

The Circle of Magi is the only option, the only place he’ll be safe. The mages can teach him to control the fire so he doesn’t get hurt by his own magic. Templars are trained to fight demons, so they can protect him from the monsters. And he’ll be surrounded by people who understand, not superstitious farmers who would blame all of their problems on magic and take their frustrations out on a mage, forgetting he’s just a boy, someone’s son. 

The only thing she can do to protect her son is giving him up to strangers who can offer him a better life. She loves him, her darling golden child, so she has to send him away.

 

When the Templars come – soon, too soon, she’s not ready to give him up yet – she tries to be strong. She doesn’t cry, not wanting to frighten her son any further by breaking down in front of him. And she knows that if she let her resolve slip even the tiniest bit, she wouldn’t be able to control her sorrow. His last memories of home should be a comfort to him, not a source of fear or guilt. So she restrains herself, not shedding a single tear. The flood welling up behind her eyes can wait until after he’s gone. 

Instead of weeping, she hugs him tight and long, murmuring encouragement and reminding him that he’s loved. That no matter what, he has always been treasured and adored. 

She isn’t sure how well her words get through, especially when coupled with her husband’s vilification and cold anger. As the Templars chain his wrists, her son alternates between being a sullen youth and a scared child. The resentment and confusion are understandable for a boy about to be taken away from the only home he’s ever known by strangers. Even if he doesn’t want her reassurance now, she hopes that he’ll remember and take comfort from it later. 

She hopes that he understands she’s sending him away to give him his best chance. 

 

She tells herself that the Circle at Hossberg isn’t really that far away. 

But it is. It’s farther than she’s ever traveled in her whole life, farther from her home than she expected to ever go. 

Still, for her son, it would be worth it. She would gladly travel into the unknown world beyond her small farming village to see her little boy. After he has some time to settle in, she’d like to visit him in his new home. To see that he’s as happy and well off as she imagines. To remind him he’s loved. To hold him again and feel his soft golden hair against her cheek. 

Mind made up, she resolves to ask the First Enchanter how she can arrange a visit during the next feastday. She writes a letter, painstakingly scratching out blocky characters on rough parchment. It takes far longer than it should for such a simple message, but writing has never been something she did often enough to come easily. It doesn’t matter; the chance to see her son is worth the effort. When it’s finished, she seals her message with candle wax and pays a courier to deliver it to Hossberg. She doesn’t tell her husband. 

The reply that arrives is written on smooth, white paper, the kind she’s only seen from a distance in the bound, illuminated Chant of Light at the village chantry. It feels almost sacrilegious to be holding such fine paper, for it to be used to write a mere letter. The script is beautiful, elaborate and flowing. She can barely read it, tracing her finger along under the words and slowly working out the curling letters. 

Rather than being frustrated or embarrassed by the effort, she feels proud. Her son, her little boy, is going to learn from people who write like this, with swirly writing on smooth white paper. He’ll be able to not only read letters like this but write them. Her little boy will have a better education than she could ever have dreamed of giving him. And he’ll never have to scratch out blocky characters with a faltering hand or trace his finger under words to read with halting slowness by the light of cheap, guttering candles. 

Slowly, painstakingly, in snatched moments so her husband won’t find out, she works through the formalities and meaningless pleasantries to decipher the main point of the letter, and her heart clenches in her chest. Her son is not at Hossberg; they took him to another Circle of Magi, the one in Ferelden. 

Ferelden. She stares at the word, tracing her finger over the fluid script and trying to convince herself that she’s misread it. Eventually she’s forced to admit that it’s right, and she collapses back in her seat. She could have gone to Hossberg, traveling unfamiliar roads across the Anderfels to see her child. But Ferelden is impossibly far away. It might as well be at the other end of Thedas, and for all she knows it is. 

Bowing her head and watching numbly as tears mar the flawless patterns of the enchanter’s letter, she finally accepts the truth: she will never see her son again. 

 

As the years pass, she thinks about her lost child often, imagining what he might look like as a man: tall, golden-haired, still with that crooked grin ready at a moment’s notice. She tries to picture him happy. And she dreams of him often. 

Her favorite dreams are the ones where he’s smiling, warm eyes sparkling with mischief or joy. He’s dressed in elaborate mage’s robes made of expensive fabrics in beautiful colors, luxurious garments more wonderful than anything she’s ever worn or even touched. Sometimes he’s reading, brow furrowed in serious thought, surrounded by heavy gold-edged leather-bound tomes, more books than she’s seen in her life. Other times he’s casting spells, healing someone or bringing rain to parched crops, using his magical gifts to help people, the way the Chant requires. 

Those are the dreams that she loves, the ones that make her happy. And she tries to focus on those dreams when she wakes in the night shaking and sweating from the other sorts of dreams. 

The ones where he stares at her vacantly, the sunburst etched on his forehead a perfect match to the one on the embroidered pillow he holds out to her. 

The ones where he cuts his wrists and summons fire from the blood to strike down faceless, helpless people, his face twisted into a rictus of mad glee. 

The ones where he lies dead at the hands of a Templar, his body warped and distorted into something unmistakably inhuman. Or the ones where his demonic form stands over the Templar instead, claws dripping blood. 

Once – only once – she dreams of him with his skin cracking open and blue fire pouring from his eyes. She thinks he’s trying to speak to her, but she can’t make out words over the frantic pounding of her heart, the blood rushing in her ears. He isn’t overtly threatening, but he terrifies her all the same. She flees from him, stumbling and staggering in her fear, and the dream mercifully ends. 

Gasping for breath, she wakes up in her own bed, covered in sweat and with the coarse linens twisted around her legs. Usually, the dreams fade once she’s awake, but this one persists. She doesn’t return to sleep that night, sitting awake until the dawn light seeps around the shutters, trying to replace the vision in her mind with the content, studious mage or even the happy, loving boy who fell asleep in her arms. 

But the nightmare is persistent. No matter how she pictures her son now, his eyes remain that unsettling shade of glowing, vibrant blue.


End file.
